Q. Are your landraces pure or have they been crossed with modern hybrids?
A. We aim to collect pristine, authentic landraces. Many of the regions where we collect are dangerous, which means that few foreigners visit. This greatly reduces the chance of modern hybrids being introduced.
There are a couple of regions in Asia where modern hybrids have become a problem, and authenticity cannot be guaranteed – notably, Parvati Valley, which includes Malana, and now also much of Thailand and Cambodia.
However, to the best of our knowledge, our other Himalayan landraces are pristine, as are all our accessions of Tai cannabis landraces from in and around Laos, which you can find in the category for Southeast Asia.
Q. Do you sell feminized seeds?
A. No…
Unless otherwise stated in the strain description, all seeds are direct from their country of origin.
For maintenance grows outside the source country, open-pollination is used, typically with as many healthy parent plants as feasible.
We do offer feminized seeds at Kwik Seeds.
Q. Which of your landraces are pure Indicas?
We offer several landrace Indicas, which you can find in these categories: Hindu Kush and Indicas.
Two accessions that exhibit particularly marked classic Indica traits are Nangarhar and Mazar-i-Sharif #2.
Please note this crucial point: real Indica landraces are not high-THC strains. If you want high-THC Indicas, you need modern sinsemilla cultivars like X18, Deep Chunk, or Afghaan 90.
Q. Which is your fastest-flowering landrace?
A. Cannabis landraces from the Near East / West Asia are certainly the earliest maturing drug-type landraces.
Depending on factors such as your latitude, climate, and sowing time, landraces such as Sinai, Lebanese, Syrian, Sudanese, and Turkish can all finish as early as August.
Q. Which is your most potent landrace?
A. Traditional ganja landraces – meaning strains domesticated for use as bud / sinsemilla, as opposed to resin / hash – are typically the most potent cannabis landraces.
Another name for these plants is ‘landrace Sativas’. These domesticates are specific to the tropics and subtropics and typically do not perform correctly north of 30° N.
Look in the tropical categories such as Tropical India, Tropical Africa, and Southeast Asia, where you will find real landrace Sativas.
Because ganja culture allows for individual plant selection, landrace Sativas have undergone stronger selection for potency. Any good ganja landrace can readily exhibit individuals with from 10% to 20% THC.
In other words, this is above all about finding oustanding individuals within these populations.
Q. Can you recommend other online sources for real landrace seeds?
A. Very few online outfits selling landrace seeds are honest or ethical, and several are flat out thieves. Do not rely on information from grow forums or review sites, because they’re overrun by bad actors and ‘sock puppets’.
If you are uncertain about whether to buy from a site, you’re welcome to contact us for their backstory first. Many groups use a multitude of social media fronts on Instagram and elsewhere in an attempt to prevent their reputation from catching up with them.
Another consideration to bear in mind is that very few Westerners under c. 40 years old are in a position to know the difference between pristine and contaminated landraces anyway. Growing up in the modern hybrid era means that even if they’re sincere about authenticity, most have no experience with authentic landraces – not with the plants, and not with the products.
Money means most online landrace seed outfits will spin some kind of orientalist backstory for you and cash in asap, regardless.
To the best of my knowledge, none of these operations have donated any of their material to Public Good preservation projects. And bear in mind, all drug-type landraces are critically endangered.
A rare honest operator selling authentic landrace seeds who doesn’t work with us directly but we can recommend is a collector from Afghanistan who we know personally: Baaba Qo. His Afghan landraces are the real deal.
Q. Can you recommend any good sources for information about cannabis landraces, such as books or websites?
A. No…
Nearly everything you can find online about cannabis landraces is nonsense, particularly most of what you’ll see on Page 1 of Google.
Links throughout this site will take you to some of the few reliable books and studies that do provide reliable, authoritative information.
You can start with posts at the Blog and the introductory blurb for each of the Categories.
To learn about landraces more generally, look at authoritative studies on other crops such brocolli or asparagus.
